Achieve a zero-day job opening fill rate even with 4% unemployment

If your recruiters are spending hours or days hunting through job postings and social media looking for job candidates and handing resumes to hiring managers — you are wasting your time.

Affordable technology now exists to replace the days of hunting online. Your recruiters can now up their game and spend more time developing relationships with the candidates found by an Artificial Intelligence platform, designed for recruiting.

With AI searching the web for quality candidates, recruiters should now spend their time developing a talent pipeline of great future employees, so your days-to-fill rate falls to ZERO.

It is time recruiting truly act as a strategic asset to your talent strategy. Recruiting should be about developing a strategic talent pipeline, not just tactics, to enable your business to identify, attract, and recruit the critical talent you need to achieve growth goals.

What does it take to develop a talent pipeline? You need:

An employer brand. Your company has to offer today’s primarily millennial, and Gen Z workforce the exciting work, higher purpose, supportive work environment, flexibility, and career development they desire. They want to work for a company that will fulfill their intrinsic motivations to work (not just be a job). They want to do meaningful work, use outstanding technology, participate on supportive teams and also have time (paid time) for life’s other purposes: raising a family, vacations, caring for sick family members, and a financially secure retirement.

A workforce plan. Workforce plans are developed by objectively looking at the talent needs of your business for the length of the business’ strategic plan. What new skills are needed? Where are these skills learned? Where do they exist now? The US? Asia? Are these skills required for the long haul and are these skills core for the business, or are they expertise that you can get through outsourcing or work platforms such as Upwork? How long does it take to identify and recruit these skills? What pay, benefits, and work environments are required to land and retain this talent?

Comprehensive talent strategies. Workforce planning is much more than identifying and reaching out to job candidates. It is more than recruiting. It requires comprehensive talent strategies that fulfill the exciting work, pay and benefits you promised while you were recruiting. You will need a comprehensive approach to talent strategy to retain the workers you recruited. It may mean making changes to your physical work environment, performance management, rewards, learning culture, and may require changes for your leaders.

Machine-learning technology platforms. Don’t recruit like it is 2017. Artificial Intelligence platforms have been well researched and developed. They will not only shorten the time to find excellent candidates, but AI will also provide you a return on investment by cutting the costs for job boards and allowing your recruiting efforts to switch from finding candidates to building relationships with them and better screening them. Besides, you will quickly learn the excellent sources for the talent you need.

An AI platform with enormous data sets. Make sure your platform has more than 300 million people and uses structured ontologies. (This isn’t Boolean word search). The AI platform should be based on science and math. Discern the glitz from the grit and use an AI platform with a strong technical team. It should improve your business performance, not just your recruiting, and should also provide you a return on your investment.

A great candidate experience. I remain dumbfounded by how many companies complain about a tight labor market and the difficulties of finding and hiring workers—yet have abhorrent recruiting processes. They make candidates wait in lobbies for interviews, don’t provide tours of the work campus, fail to allow them to meet future co-workers, and generally treat them like high school students. Wake up. The shoe is on the other foot. You need to offer candidates an experience that treats them like prospective customers, complete with precise information about what your company has to offer them and their careers, and details about your work environment, pay, benefits, flexible work policies, career development, and timely updates on your decision making. I suggest your website or social media sites also feature the work and experiences of your current employees—they are your best salespeople when it comes to recruiting.

Zero days to fill a job requisition with 4% unemployment. Sound crazy? When you begin to recruit for a talent pipeline, your AI will identify active candidates, “warm” candidates (that quietly want to make a change without alerting their employers they are looking) and “passive” candidates. The role of your recruiters is to keep the relationship warm and reach out to them when you are ready to hire, and they are ready for a move. When candidates are identified and vetted before the hire date, you can hire quickly.

When it comes to changes to recruiting, the future is now. Not 2025 or 2020. 2017 is so old. Are you ready to accept the present and change?

Victor Assad is the CEO of Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting and is a Managing Partner of InnovationOne. He consults and provides “hands-on” support for innovation, global talent strategies, developing agile leaders and teams, and other strategic initiatives. Visit https://victorhrconsultant.com/recruiting-with-ai/ to learn more.